The Absolution of Otto Finkel

Brittany, 1964. A meeting between two men reopens a history that began decades earlier, when five boys from different European countries shared a summer at St Malo before war scattered them across the continent. Among them is Otto Finkel, whose later path takes him into the SS, while the others encounter the collapse of France, Dunkirk, occupation, persecution and the widening machinery of the Holocaust.

McKay uses the friends’ diverging lives to connect the war itself with its moral aftermath, including exile and the problem of Nazi fugitives who escaped Europe after 1945. The central characters and their personal relationships are fictional, but the novel moves through documented settings of war, deportation and post-war flight. Its main concern is the lasting burden of complicity, survival and the possibility—or impossibility—of absolution.